Sunday, February 28, 2016

I came into the Church nineteen years ago. In the preceding years, working as a lawyer, I’d sought, wept, read widely.

But maybe the best thing I did was that I started ducking into churches to pray. If you are really seeking, and really conflicted, and really troubled by the emptiness of the world, a church with an open door is a very big deal.

It was the open door of St. Basil’s, in Koreatown, that beckoned me to my first real Mass, at noon on a weekday.

I tell the story in Redeemed:

“I remember a bronze statue of someone who appeared to be a robed lunatic looming in the foyer: this, I later learned, was St. Paul. I remember pushing open the doors to the sanctuary and being afraid “they’d” know I wasn’t Catholic and would kick me out. I remember the way the light shone like honey on the teakwood pews, not knowing whether or how to genuflect, not being able to follow along in the missallette. I remember instinctively understanding that here was consecrated time, consecrated space; that the people who had come to worship in the middle of the day, who were kneeling, standing, praying, were part of a parallel universe that intersected with eternity.

But mostly I remember seeing Christ on the cross above the altar. I’d been seeing images of the crucified Christ all my life, but I’d never seen one in the context of Mass—of this mystery, this ritual. And I didn’t exactly have a burning bush experience, but it pretty much stopped me cold. St. Basil’s has a beautiful 4th-century Tuscan crucifix, and as I gazed up at Christ, his head drooping towards his breast, everything in me wanted to move towards him: to comfort him, to touch him, to be near. I saw he’d come to address the deepest mystery of humankind—the mystery of suffering. I saw that like us, he was in pain and he wasn’t sure why, whether it would ever end, or what it was for. I saw he wasn’t saying we were supposed to suffer extra; he was acknowledging the suffering we were already in.”

At the time I did not know a single practicing Catholic—another reason why those open doors were a Godsend. Now that I know lots of Catholics, I may need those open doors even more.

In The Story of a Soul, St. Thérèse of Lisieux wrote of her time as a young girl at the local abbey school:

“I didn’t have, like the other former students, a teacher friend with whom I could go spend several hours. . . . Nobody paid attention to me, so I went up to the gallery of the chapel, and I remained before the Blessed Sacrament until the time when Papa would come to get me. This was my only comfort: Wasn’t Jesus my only Friend?”

That Jesus is our Friend at all may be the central Christian mystery.

That God took on a human body, heart, voice, face, opens the way to an intimacy that, with our fear of vulnerability, is almost unbearable.

We could ponder for all of Lent a single passage from John’s Gospel: “This is my commandment: love one another as I love you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I no longer call you slaves, because a slave does not know what his master is doing. I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father” [John 15: 12-15].

Jesus also tells us, But when you pray, go to your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will repay you [Matthew 6:6]. If our “room” is sometimes a sanctuary, or a chapel, so much the better.

Shortly after moving to my new neighborhood in Pasadena, I came across St. Elizabeth of Hungary Catholic Church on North Lake Avenue in Altadena. I discovered that the side chapel where daily Mass is said, through a courtyard with roses and a beautiful old fountain, is generally open weekdays from 8:30 a.m. until 9 at night, and on weekends from 10 a.m. until 2:30.

I often make my way on foot to that blessed space with its whitewashed walls and old-school Stations of the Cross, a red candle burning beside the tabernacle. I often say Evening Prayer there, alone.

In silence, I realize how tired I am and think: “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.”

In solitude I realize all over again, Isn’t Jesus my only Friend?

I know that not every church, especially in the inner city, has the resources to leave its doors open all day. But what a blessed gift we receive from the churches that can.

Thérèse of Lisieux was once asked what she said to Jesus when she prayed. She thought for a minute, then replied: “I don’t say much of anything. I just love Him.”

Thursday, February 25, 2016

"If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need."--Cicerto

My vegetable and flower seeds are up! I go out many times a day to check on their progress.
I have no real idea what I'm doing, but gardening friends will help. Venturing into an area about which I know so little makes me feel quite vulnerable. What will happen if I "fail!" Will the plants think I'm lame and make fun of me?

Of course I've read up a bit, and I have purchased the Sunset Western Gardening Book, but my sense is that gardening is like cooking: you simply have to venture forth, and get a feel, and make mistakes and have triumphs and that is how you learn.

It's difficult to describe the rush of hope, exhilaration and excitement that comes from planting a seed and seeing a single green shoot poking its head above ground.

Dylan Thomas wrote:

"The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees

Is my destroyer"...

But it's spring and I'm going to choose at the moment to focus on the flower.

I bought this red kale as seedlings, which is they're so big compared tothe others.

Monday, February 22, 2016

Yesterday I got to sit on my balcony for an hour or two before walking to 5:00 Mass. Work of various kinds has kept me from the lying-fallow, idling time I long for and that, in its season, will inevitably (I FERVENTLY pray) come again. The succulents, agaves and geranium drank deeply of the sun--like me!--and together, we refreshed each other's spirits. I'm continually struck by how, just when I'm most in need, a "word" comes from "out there": a thank you, a reflection from a fellow lover of St Therese of Lisieux, a link to a project by a guy named Thomas Kiefer who works for the Mexican border patrol and takes photos of the goods--wallets, toilet paper, backpacks--that are confiscated and thrown away. El Sueño Americano (The American Dream), the project's called.Last night I received this quote from a reader and a friend. "No one in the world knows the reason for the conversions of pagans at the very ends of the earth, for the heroic endurance of Christians under persecution, for the heavenly joy of martyred missionaries. All this is invisibly bound up with the prayers of some humble cloistered nun [some weird blogger chick in LA.] Her fingers play upon the keyboard of divine forgiveness and of the eternal lights; her silent and lonely soul presides over the salvation of souls and the conquests of the Church."--Jean-Baptiste Chautard, The Soul of the Apostolate

Saturday, February 20, 2016

Many years ago I took a guided tour of the Los Angeles River, which runs from Canoga Park to Long Beach. At the time, the river cut a mostly unseen, mostly unremarked upon, largely under-utilized 52-mile swath through the city. At the time, the response to the mention of such a tour was likely to be, “L.A. has a river?”

All that has changed. As the website for the L.A. River Center and Gardens explains, “The Los Angeles River Center and Gardens is located at the former site of the Lawry’s California Center, near the confluence of the L.A. River and the Arroyo Seco, close to Elysian Park and downtown Los Angeles. Its beautiful mission-style grounds and conference facilities serve as a focal point for the renewal of the L.A. River, and a prime location for community gatherings, educational conferences and special events.”

In fact, perhaps nothing illustrates the extent of the change more than the fact that the L.A. River Center seems to be soliciting clients to hold their weddings there.

For a more down-home, grass-roots activist approach, check out the Friends of the L.A. River (FoLAR), an organization founded over three decades ago by poet Lewis MacAdams.

As you may know, the Congress is a lollapalooza of an affair that takes place each early spring at the Anaheim Convention Center. The place is crawling with Catholic publishers, editors, priests, nuns and layfolk shopping for rosaries, Jesus tchotchkes and a chance to hear such luminaries as Father Ron Rolheiser, Auxiliary Bishop Robert E. Barron and Sister Helen Prejean dispense their wisdom.

It is no place for an introvert and just navigating the parking structure makes me want to lie down for four or five hours.

It is also a huge honor. I’m devoting a certain amount of time to working up my remarks, and again and again I circle back to this column, which, if you must know, is kind of the joy of my life."

Thursday, February 11, 2016

Forty or fifty blooms, each land-labelled, were laid out on tables, with names like "Frosted Star," "Angel Wings," "Sweet Emily Kate" and "Pagoda."

My own yard also has four or five old-growth camellia bushes, each a good two stories high. I can almost reach off my balcony and pick the blooms.

The bush closest to me has five different colors and types of camellias, all on one tree. I don't know whether grafting, or another phenomenon, is at play. I just know they're spectacular. One is snow white with a pale, pale pink stripe or "stain."

The Secret Life of Plantsis a book by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, later apparently made into a 1979 documentary. For now, both must come under the heading of What I Wouldn't Do for Two or Three More Hours in Each Day.

That is part of the Cross. Sometimes it seems we're either enduring life on the one hand, thinking, Man, life is long! Or on the other hand, we're so excited about life we can hardly stand that in our short span here on earth we're never going to be able to take in, learn about, and experience everything we wish we could.

I love taking pictures of flowers. My sense is they are shy about their beauty! If you admire them very much, and stay very quiet, and exercise great patience, sometimes they will yield up a secret or two.

The photos below are of the camellias in my yard at night, lit by the motion sensor lamps that come on along the outside stairwell.

Sunday, February 7, 2016

“In order to be free you simply have to be so, without asking permission of anybody. You have to have your own hypothesis about what you are called to do, and follow it, not giving in to circumstances or complying with them. But that sort of freedom demands powerful inner resources, a high degree of self-awareness, a consciousness of your responsibility to yourself and therefore to other people."

I BELIEVE IN MIRACLES!!

I'M RESTLESS, IRRITABLE, AND DISCONTENT

I'M SO LONESOME I COULD CRY

I CONFESS

FLANNERY O'CONNOR

ST. THÉRÈSE OF LISIEUX

"If you are willing to bear serenely the trial of being displeasing to yourself, then you will be for Jesus a pleasant place of shelter."

GERALD MANLEY HOPKINS

"Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain."

DOROTHY DAY

"We have all known the long loneliness, and we have found that the answer is community."

CARYLL HOUSELANDER

"I think all teddy bears should have knitted suits."

ROBERT BRESSON

"Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen."

FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

"The world will be saved by beauty."

BILL CUNNINGHAM

“I don’t work I only know how to have fun every day…. It’s as true now as it ever was: He who seeks beauty will find it!”

JACQUES LUSSEYRAN: BLIND HERO OF THE FRENCH RESISTANCE

"The self-centered life has no place in the world of the deported. You must go beyond it, lay hold on something outside yourself."

EMILY DICKINSON

“I like a look of Agony/Because I know it’s true”

GLENN GOULD

"I've had all my life a tremendously strong sense that indeed there is a hereafter, and that the transformation of the spirit is a phenomenon which one must reckon and in light of which one must attempt to live one's life."

MARIA YUDINA

Sviatoslav Richter said of her: "One day she developed a crush on someone who didn’t return her advances. One can understand why; he must have been terrified of her. And so she challenged him to a duel."

ALBERT CAMUS

"I came to literature through worship."

RAYMOND CHANDLER

“It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI

“I have an almost ideological esthetic preference for nonprofessional actors who themselves are shreds of reality as is a landscape, a sky, the sun, a donkey passing along the road.”

PEACE PILGRIM

"There is a magic formula for resolving conflicts. It is this: Have as your objective the resolving of the conflict, not the gaining of advantage."

SIMON RODIA

“I had it in my mind to do something big—and I did.”

FRANZ WRIGHT

"Soon, soon, between one instant and the next, you will be well." From "Nude with Handgun and Rosary."

MARIA CALLAS

"I prepare myself for rehearsals like I would for a marriage."

WERNER HERZOG

HERZOG “Take a close and very long look into the eyes of a chicken…It's the most horrifying, cannibalistic, and nightmarish creature in this world."

CARLO CARRETTO

“The perfection of God is cast in a material which men almost despise, which they don’t consider worth searching for because of its simplicity, its lack of interest, because it is common to all men.”

JEAN-HENRI FABRÉ: THE HOMER OF THE INSECT WORLD

“After eighty-seven years of thought and observation, I say not merely that I believe in God—I can even say that I see him.”

DONALD EVANS

“It was vicarious traveling for me to a made-up world that I liked better than the one I was in…No catastrophes occur. There are no generals or battles or warplanes on my stamps….Sometimes I get so concentrated in these worlds I get confused. …It’s hard to get out.”

HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN

"Every man's life is a fairy tale written by God's fingers."

EDDIE AIKAU

“Eddie didn’t take off where everyone else took off. He took off deeper.” Eddie's brother Clyde.

MARTA BECKET

“Society laughs at old people’s dreams. They even laugh at dreams…until they come true.”

KAZUO OHNO

"The best thing someone can say to me is that while watching my performance they began to cry,”

BETTY MacDONALD

"'There's nothing as cozy as a piece of candy and a book."

LOUISE NEVELSON

"I feel that what people call by the word ‘scavenger’ is really a resurrection."

SVIATOSLAV RICHTER

"During one period of chronic depression, it was impossible for me to live without a plastic lobster that I took with me everywhere."

THE BROTHERS QUAY

"It's that little glint, that privileged look into a keyhole, and realizing suddenly that there's this little universe that's probably suffering and barely breathing, but it's pulsating, vibrating, with its own life. That in itself is a metaphor of the universe."

THE KING: "MAN, I REALLY LIKE VEGAS."

Jesus statue found in Elvis's bedroom at Graceland. Photo by H. King.

BILL MONROE

"Bluegrass has brought more people together and made more friends than any music in the world."

BILL W.

"We'll make it not because we're a better people--but because we're a weaker people."

BILL HICKS

"By the way, if anyone here is in marketing or advertising...kill yourself. Thank you."

MORE FASCINATING PLACES

MY NEW BOOK! HOLY DESPERATION

PRAYING AS IF YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON IT

As St. Thérèse of Lisieux said, "All prayer arises from incompetence. Otherwise there is no need for it." Self-obsessed, easily distracted, full of petty judgments and irrational fears, I should know. Thoughts on the development of my own "inner life."

MY OTHER BOOKS

PARCHED

SIN, REDEMPTION, AND REHAB

REDEEMED

STUMBLING TOWARD GOD

SHIRT OF FLAME

ROAMING K'TOWN, L.A. WITH THÉRÈSE OF LISIEUX

POOR BABY

A CHILD OF THE 60'S LOOKS BACK ON ABORTION

HOLY DAYS AND GOSPEL REFLECTIONS

COLLECTED WRITINGS FROM MAGNIFICAT

STUMBLE: VICE, VIRTUE, AND THE SPACE BETWEEN

ESSAYS ON CRISIS, SALVATION, AND THE DAILY TRAGICOMEDY OF THE CROSS

STRIPPED: CANCER, CULTURE AND THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING

MY GOING-AGAINST-MEDICAL-ADVICE "CANCER MEMOIR"

STRIPPED BOOK TRAILER: NATTERINGS FROM JOSHUA TREE...

LOADED: MONEY AND THE SPIRITUALITY OF ENOUGH

HOW I WENT FROM TRYING TO GET BY ON 27 CENTS A DAY TO A FULL, RICH LIFE OF SERVICE TO MY FELLOW SICK PEOPLE!